Bamboo: The Birth of a Superfood

Superfoods wear me out.

It’s not the foods but the hype that I find so exhausting. Specifically, the verb phrases. From acai to za’atar, superfoods are said to be “packed with” or “rich in” or “chock-full of” nutrients that make you healthier and prevent disease.

These aren’t totally false claims. You do get more nutrients per ounce from kale as opposed to celery. But labeling anything a “superfood” is a marketing ploy. It’s not a scientific category.

For this reason, I almost tuned out when I heard that bamboo is the newest superfood.

This claim, prompted by a study published last week, has been aired in the news and social media, and now, when you google “Is bamboo a superfood?”, AI Overview says “yes” and links you to the new study.

Having lived in China (and being a fan of Southeast Asian cuisines) I’ve eaten a lot of bamboo shoots in my day. I always assumed they were a good source of fiber. But is there something else “super” about them? I was intrigued – and mildly hopeful.

It turns out that the authors of the study never used the term “superfoods”. They concluded, modestly, that eating bamboo “may have multiple health benefits”.

So, I want to discuss three questions:

1. Why is the concept of superfoods appealing? Why did I, a superfood skeptic, still hope that bamboo would turn out to be “super”?

2. What are the health benefits of eating bamboo? Is there any sense in which it’s “super”?

3. Why have the news and social media, and AI, begun to claim that bamboo may be a new superfood?

1. The appeal of superfoods.

Marketing helps create markets. Among American women, for instance, removal of body hair was largely spurred by early 20th century advertising campaigns.

Superfoods are slickly marketed too – successfully, I think, because the marketing taps into something primal. Deep down, we want at least some foods to be “super” in some respects.

A framework for what happens was laid out by Daniel Kahneman in his 2011 bestseller Thinking Fast and Slow. (Kahneman, a Nobel laureate, was one of the most influential scholars in fields ranging from cognitive psychology to behavioral economics.)

Kahneman argues that we all have two systems of thought:

• System 1 is fast, emotional, and frequently automatic.

• System 2 is slower, more logical, and more deliberate.

System 1 is the source of irrational thinking, as when we hear about a plane crash and immediately start worrying about our upcoming flight. It’s system 2 which reminds us that, statistically speaking, flying is by far the safest mode of transportation.

Although Kahneman’s focus was on judgment and decision-making, what he calls system 1 thinking includes at least two tendencies that make the superfood concept appealing:

First, system 1 thinking leads us to substitute simpler questions for more complex ones.

Consider a person who wants to improve their cardiovascular health. Based on what they’ve heard, they ought to be asking: What changes are needed to my diet, activity levels, stress, sleep habits, and so on? Which changes should I prioritize? What exactly should I do? But it’s easier to just ask: Which food will improve my heart health?

Second, system 1 thinking creates the so-called focusing illusion. This refers to the way we overestimate the impact of individual factors on our future well-being. If I just get that promotion, for instance, my problems will be solved and I’ll be happy.

With respect to superfoods, the focusing illusion leads us to assume that by eating one particular food, our health will dramatically improve.

In short, system 1 thinking leads us to frame questions about health in simple terms, and to expect simple behaviors, like eating a superfood, to have big impacts. The problem is that system 1 thinking is routinely wrong. As Kahneman notes:

“System 1 is radically insensitive to both the quality and quantity of the information that gives rise to impressions... [W]e often fail to allow for the possibility that evidence that SHOULD be critical to our judgement is missing.”

So, we read that bamboo is a superfood, and immediately system 1 blurts out: Yep, that’s it. That’s the secret. We need more of it.

But do we?

2. What are the health benefits of eating bamboo?

The new study, led by Damiano Pizzol (Eni) and senior author Lee Smith (Angela Ruskin University, Cambridge) is actually a review of the literature – i.e., 16 studies focusing on the health impacts of bamboo consumption. According to the authors, this is the first systematic review of its kind.

Ordinarily, literature reviews are helpful, because they save time ­– you don’t have to read the individual studies – and because the reviewers offer critical evaluation.

This particular review was poorly written and simply reiterated study claims, so I felt like I should read or at least skim the original 16 studies.

(My system 1 response was annoyance with the reviewers, but system 2 reminded me that you can understanding data better by examining it yourself. Thank you, system 2.)

Fortunately, there’s a simple takeaway from the 16 studies: Bamboo is a healthy food, but there’s no evidence that it’s healthy in any distinctive or “super” way.

I’d like to share two examples of what that means:

(a) A 2020 study showed that eating bamboo reduces exposure to acrylamide, a potentially carcinogenic chemical formed by heating starchy foods.

This was a good study; I trust the results. But they don’t show that bamboo is especially helpful.

Everyone in the study was asked to eat potato chips. Half the participants were also given capsules containing bamboo extract, while the other half received capsules containing a placebo (corn starch).

The main finding was that bamboo extract reduced acrylamide exposure more than corn starch did. That’s great, but there’s a ton of evidence that many other vegetables (e.g., cruciferous ones – broccoli, cabbage, etc.) do the same thing too.

Is bamboo more helpful than the other vegetables? There’s no way of knowing; comparisons haven’t been made. We don’t even know exactly how the researchers prepared the bamboo extract used in their study.

(b) A 2022 study showed that bamboo powder lowers blood glucose in people with type 2 diabetes.

Impressive, right?

Here again, I trust the findings, but they don’t show that bamboo is especially healthy.

In this study, diabetics were given cookies either baked with powdered bamboo or baked without it. Over the next 2 hours, those who ate the bamboo cookies showed lower blood glucose readings.

Unfortunately, the reviewers failed to note that all of the cookies were the same size and weight, and all of them were made out of flour, oil, sugar, salt, and baking powder.

In order to add bamboo powder to some of those cookies, the researchers had to remove some of the other ingredients – mainly the dry ones. People who ate the bamboo cookies were therefore eating less flour and sugar, both of which increase blood glucose.

In other words, the study only shows that if you replace flour and sugar with bamboo powder, blood glucose is less strongly affected. That’s a good thing, but, once again, so many other ingredients besides bamboo would outperform flour and sugar too.

The moral of the story is that if you run an experiment comparing X to Y, and X is better in some sense, you can only conclude that X is superior to Y. You can’t say X is better than anything else – unless there’s other data that can be used for comparisons. We don’t have that data for bamboo.

Eating bamboo is healthy, according to the 16 experimental and in vitro studies, but none of them show that it’s distinctively healthy, much less “super”. (The same could be said for so many other so-called superfoods.)

Why say that bamboo shoots are “healthy” in the first place? I want to get very concrete now.

Bamboo shoots are routinely praised as a good low-calorie, low-fat source of protein, fiber, vitamin B6, vitamin E, and copper. So, I was curious about how much of these nutrients you’d get from stir-frying and eating 1 cup of raw bamboo shoots.

(1 cup would be a sizable portion – about 140-150 grams, yielding roughly 100-120 grams of cooked shoots, or close to a quarter pound.)

Based on this table I’d say that bamboo is a good source for these nutrients (except copper) but not anything you’d call super. I’m not tempted to say it’s “loaded with” or “chock-full of” anything.

Besides, what makes any one food a “good source” of nutrients depends on the rest of your diet. If you want more of these nutrients from a low-fat, low-calorie source, bamboo is a good choice. But if you’re eating well, you’re unlikely to be lacking in any of them.

(By the way, if you buy fresh bamboo shoots, don’t eat them raw. You’re not a panda. Raw shoots contain chemicals that would be converted into cyanide and poison you once eaten. If you have hypothyroidism and/or an iodine deficiency, proper preparation is especially critical to prevent the risk of goiters. You can sidestep these toxicity issues via canned shoots, which are boiled and fully cooked – you lose a bit on vitamins and texture, but gain in safety and convenience.)

3. Why is bamboo being called a superfood?

The authors of the new study only claimed that bamboo “may have a variety of health benefits”. They made no references to superfoods.

So, what happened?

Often it’s hard to pinpoint the origins of misinformation. Not this time.

The study actually appeared online in late November. For two months it was barely noticed, presumably because the journal is obscure (Advances in Bamboo Science), and because – apologies for continuing to repeat this – the authors made no strong or catchy claims.

On January 14th, Angela Ruskin University (where senior author Lee Smith and other co-authors are employed) announced on its website that bamboo has ‘superfood’ potential. The next day, ARU posted similar claims on Facebook and other social media.

One day later, the science news site StudyFinds covered the study, and within a few days it was being discussed in a variety of places, including large-circulation news outlets like MSN, The Guardian, and The New York Post. Thanks to ARU’s announcements, the authors’ modest suggestion that bamboo is healthy entered mainstream news and social media already transformed into the claim that it may be a superfood.

Social media immediately took note, and there another transformation, already seen in some of the news coverage, began to spread. This was a shift from saying that bamboo may be a superfood, to the claim that it is one (as in the Instagram post above). System 1 thinking is winning here.

AI scrapes new content at increasingly high speeds. Google’s AI Overview now answers the question “Is bamboo a superfood?” affirmatively, providing a link to the new study. (The free versions of ChatGPT and Claude AI haven’t caught up yet. I expect they will.)

There you have it: The birth of a superfood. First, a study. Then news coverage. Then, social media whisks the newborn off to the land of hyperbole, and, meanwhile, AI anoints the findings as True.

Bamboo is not a superfood. It’s just another healthy vegetable – more or less healthy depending on the rest of your diet. If you eat well, you don’t need it. But if you want something with a bit of crunch and a mild, slightly nutty flavor, by all means enjoy.

Thanks for reading!